The Dirt on Public Archaeology

This is my first time blogging, so I’ll go ahead and introduce myself. My name is Adam Cripps, and I’m another one of Sarah’s minions….I mean outreach assistants. I’m a senior here at Flagler College, and am also the president of the newly formed Archaeology Club on campus. Here in a few weeks, I’ll be wrapping up my first semester working with FPAN….wow time flies by quickly…..

But now we proceed to the meat and potatoes of this post, Sarah has asked me to share some highlights of the last few weeks with all you loyal readers.

On the weekend of 14-16 November, the schools archaeology club made a trip down to the Crystal River State Archaeological Site. The Central Regional Center of FPAN, headed by Mr. Richard Estabrook, sponsored the trip and arranged camping for us at the park as well as a personalized tour of the site. In addition to the personal tour, the club arrived just in time to participate in the “Moon over the Mounds” tour that the park runs as well as observe the beginnings of a dugout canoe in their experimental archaeology area. Nicholas Baine, a freshman at Flagler, and yours truly even got to help out the park staff for a bit by hacking at the tree with some shell tools. It wasn’t just fun and games for the weekend however, as we set to work preparing a new section of the “temple mound” for excavation by school groups as part of their “Sifting for Technology” program. For those unfamiliar with the program, it is a replica temple mound made up of actual materials from Mound B which fell into the river when the seawall collapsed in 1993. Various schools and groups, especially those catering to at-risk youths, come out and excavate the mound which provides the basis for a faunal analysis to complement other work being done at the site in areas where contextual integrity is still present. The club also visited other historic and archaeological sites in the area, such as the Yulee Sugar Mill, before heading back to term papers.

Keep an eye out later this week for my next posting on the Maple Leaf shipwreck and the newest addition to our interpretive tool box….